There is a tradition in many business schools to ask their faculty to publish their articles in journals that are on “the list”. The most popular are the University of Dallas (UTD) list of 24 journals and the Financial Times list of 50 journals (FT50). Reasonable people can disagree about which journals should or should not be on the list, but until recently they were all journals that published business research. That is no longer the case. The FT50 list recently replaced two business journals with journals in psychology and sociology that are not business journals. This makes little sense to me and underscores the folly of relying on these lists because business research should be about business.
The Latest FT50 List
The FT50 has always been a list of 50 journals across the business disciplines. Journals on the list include
- Accounting: Journal of Accounting and Economics
- Finance: Review of Finance
- Information Systems: MIS Quarterly
- Management: Academy of Management Journal
- Marketing: Marketing Science
All of these are first and foremost journals that publish research articles on topics relevant to business. For example, accounting journals publish articles about auditors, management journals publish articles about employees, and marketing journals publish articles about customers. In the latest edition two of the business journals have been replaced with journals from other fields. Psychological Science is a journal devoted to the science of psychology. The journal’s own description says they are concerned with “cognitive, social, developmental, and health psychology, as well as behavioral neuroscience and biopsychology”. Conspicuous by its absence is a mention of industrial-organizational psychology, the only area that is concerned with business research. Sure, the journal might occasionally publish an article using an employed sample (I found one in 2026), but that doesn’t make it a leading outlet for business research.
The same can be said for American Sociological Review. Its website notes that it is focused on “all areas of sociology” and publishes work about “fundamental social processes”. Although fundamental social processes affect business, as do basic psychological processes, this journal’s focus is not on business. Faculty in colleges of business should not be pressured to study basic social processes that might appeal to this journal rather than business research that would be published elsewhere.
Business Research Should Be About Business
The disconnect between academic business research and practice has been growing as published work has become more and more theoretical. Few papers provide directly actionable insights, but they have been mostly about topics relevant to business. A scenario study about motives for unethical behavior using a student sample might not provide hints about how to reduce employee theft, but they do provide deep background about the problem. But as schools just push faculty to publish on the list at all costs–and costs include tenure, teaching load and financial incentives–will we see business faculty abandon business research and start publishing papers on basic psychology and sociology?
Using Lists Wisely
There is nothing wrong with having lists, but lists should be used wisely. Getting a paper in UTD, FT50 or any other list of top journals is an event to be celebrated. Encouraging faculty to aim for journals on lists is fine, but when the pressure gets extreme where hiring, promotion, and rewards depend on publishing on a short list, unintended consequences will follow. When faculty need to get on the list at all costs, those costs will include a focus on theoretical but irrelevant topics, an avoidance of anything innovative that might be high risk, and questionable research practices that undermine the integrity of our work. It is an ecological fallacy that publishing in a particular outlet says anything about an individual’s work, so we should not use outlets as a measure of the quality of someone’s work or depth of their impact. Publishing a paper in an FT50 journal does not guarantee that anyone will read it, let alone cite it. My FT50 papers are among my most and least cited.
A better approach to lists is to consider where the best places are to publish based on topic. If a faculty member does work on research methodology, Organizational Research Methods would be at the top of my list. The most impactful journal for employee health and well-being would be Journal of Occupational Health Psychology. If nurses are the focus of study, International Journal of Nursing Studies is the highest impact option. None of these journals appears on the FT50 or UTD lists. We can hope that the new additions to the FT50 list has business schools re-examining how they use journal lists and find better ways to evaluate and reward faculty in a way that gets the message across that business research should be about business and that you don’t have to publish from a small list of journals when better, and often higher impact options exist.
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